Eighteen Till I Die: Surrendering Our Children to the God-State

I’ve contemplated the moral implications of modern Western society’s notion of young people’s “coming of age” for quite some time. This question of when and how children become adults is something all members of all societies are confronted with, and reflected in different traditions. For parents in particular it always involves a major re-adjustment as they continue their relationship with their children. I’ve come to view the modernist understanding of the matter in terms of certain anti-Christian religious presuppositions – a usurpation of the traditional rites of passage of our peoples, to which many within the church and even the homeschool movement have also succumbed.

One recent example I experienced was close family members whose son turned eighteen. For his birthday he invited a lot of friends over for a house party, for which his parents supplied an abundance of liquor. All the kids present got very drunk, and some vomited in and outside the house as they struggled to handle the excessive drinking. Of course there are many other types of examples. such as parents providing their children with condoms or birth control once they start their intense sex-ed program at their government school and “inevitably” become sexually active.

Other examples would include parents who re-establish their relationship with their children as one of mere friendship, rather than maintaining the preceding filial relationship, once they reach the age the state deems them to be adults. Ironically, for all their anti-state propaganda, many libertarians maintain their notion of liberty and rights as applicable to “consenting adults” – a category created, defined, and maintained by the state itself.

The religious presuppositions underlying parents’ granting of libertine rights to their children involve subordinating God’s Law for man’s. The idea that parents’ role and authority extends only as far as the state limits individual liberty of “minors” involves surrendering spheres of authority to the usurping state that are divinely endued to the family and clan.

Scripture clearly teaches that when a man marries, he leaves his father and mother behind (Gen. 2:24; Matt. 19:5; Mark 10:8; Eph. 5:31). The implications of this doctrine are far-reaching for the way we should view and apply the role of the family in our lives. It is clear that men and women remain under the authority of their parents until they marry, regardless of their age. Scripture knows no “legal drinking age,” “legal working age,” or “age of consent.” which are categories invented by the enemies of Christendom. Interestingly, our ancient European traditions regarding rites of passage generally involved intensifying the tie to one’s elders and one’s tribe, not individualistically separating oneself (by “going off to college”) from the clan, as happens in modern society.

Obviously, I’m not advocating that parents treat their twenty-year-old children the same way they did when they were ten, but it must be understood that they remain under parental authority, even if they were to be financially independent. I also don’t advocate for children not to take up increased responsibilities as they grow older. In fact, recent history has taught us that children have become lazier, more careless, more dependent, and less responsible under systems implementing these very Marxist laws against which I advocate.

Here are several reforms to the erroneous modernist understanding that we must understand and apply in our familial lives:

1. The fifth commandment to honor father and mother (and by implication all ancestors) was given to the people of Israel as a whole. There is no indication from the Bible that this commandment ceases to be applicable once we reach a certain age or achieve a certain social status.

2. Of course parents can’t control their children’s lives, but this is not only true when they turn eighteen or twenty-one. At earlier stages in our children’s lives there are many instances where parents have no control either. But we must remember that as parents, controlling our children’s lives is not what we are called to do – not when they are thirty, but neither when they are thirteen either. Also, the way discipline and guidance is given to our children at different stages of their lives should certainly be dictated by the demands of Christian wisdom. One can spank a ten-year-old child when he is naughty, but this would certainly be inappropriate when the child is twenty. However, as children mature, other forms of discipline – financial or social – may become more appropriate, but the duty of disciplining our children certainly doesn’t cease simply when the state says it does.

3. We ought to restore traditional rites of passage in which young males are granted the same responsibilities as the men of the tribe. Do away with the association of libertine independence from the family and clan. The reverse has always been true in Christian and even pre-Christian Europe: young men’s coming of age involved becoming part of the warriors of the tribe under the guidance of their elders.

4. Freedoms should be granted to children when we deem it appropriate, and not be dependent upon when “it becomes legal.” For example, having a beer or two with your fifteen-year-old son might be illegal, but could serve as a much more moderate and gradual introduction to the pleasures of adulthood rather than leaving him with hundreds of dollars’ worth of liquor at the house with his friends for his eighteenth or twenty-first birthday while you and your spouse get away for the weekend.

5. Young people should get married much earlier. It is an illness of our society that young people move in together before they get married or even date for 5+ years before they decide to get engaged. This distortion has partially come about by the introduction of love-based marriages, which have replaced the superior old notion of marriage as a traditional, patriarchal, community- and economy-based institution. Marriages should also be viewed in terms of the traditional conception of a covenant between two families, rather than merely two individuals.

6. The place of the extended family or clan should be restored against the reduction of the family-structure to its nuclear unit. We must re-orient ourselves to embrace the traditionalist notion of the clan as the first sphere of authority in a society based in the biblical principle of subsidiarity. Once we have done this, the familial structure of authority can be applied in the whole clan-family, where younger generations submit to the authority and counsel of their kinsmen-elders in a patriarchal and clan-based authority structure based in God’s Law.

7. The concept of “coming of age” in the sense of becoming independent as an individual, separated from the bonds of family and kin, is destructive to the good social order as instituted by God. As parents, handing our children over to the libertine god, is a violation against God’s Law and, contrary to human wisdom, also unloving. We can’t expect divine blessings upon our progeny if we willfully surrender our God-given (continuing) responsibilities towards them.

These principles and steps need to be taken seriously and put into practice if we are to have any chance of rescuing our progeny from the apostasy we now see rampant among our peoples today. The Cultural Marxist revolutions driven by baby boomers since the 1960s needs to be undone completely as the Christian reconstruction of our families is absolutely vital to our continued existence as white Christian families, clans, and nations.

Adi is a Traditionalist Millennial of Dutch, German and French Huguenot ancestry. He holds a PhD in Theology from one of the world's top 100 universities.
Follow him on Twitter, or email him at adifandh [at] gmail.com.

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Faith & Heritage is a consortium of Christian writers from a traditionalist perspective. F&H features a diverse range of opinions among its writers, and any particular opinion expressed is not necessarily indicative of universal agreement among F&H admins or writers.

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Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. - Deuteronomy 32:7-8